Collective ignorance and the last good hope in the world
Cyclist Tyler Hamilton revealed in 2012 in his book "The Secret Race" (written together with Daniel Coyle) the most sophisticated program in the history of sports for the use of drugs. The show was won by Lance Armstrong, who won the Tour de France seven times and was stripped of his titles after an in-depth investigation by the US Anti-Doping Agency. Hamilton showed how such an elaborate system was able to exist thanks to the "law of omerta" - the code of silence that made every competitor believe that all the other athletes believe that drug use is common property - and reinforced by threats of punishment for those who lie or disobey.
The broader psychological principle at work here is "collective ignorance" (or pluralistic ignorance): a situation in which individuals in a group do not believe something but mistakenly believe that all other members of the group do. When no one talks about it out loud, the "spiral of silence" is born, which can lead people to a variety of behaviors, from binge drinking to joining witch hunts to deadly ideologies. For example, a study conducted in 1998 by Christine M. Schroeder and Deborah A. Prentice found that "most students believed that all of their peers accepted campus drinking habits more comfortably than they themselves did." Another study, conducted by Prentice in collaboration with Dale T. Miller in 1993, found a gender difference in relation to drinking: "The students changed their attitude over time to match what they mistakenly believed to be the prevailing attitude. In contrast, the female students did not change their attitude." But women are not immune to collective ignorance when it comes to relationships, as a 2003 study by Tracy A. Lambert and her colleagues showed. They found that "both women and men rated their friends as participating in such [relational] behaviors more comfortably than they rated themselves."
When you add the factor of punishment for those who challenge the norm, collective ignorance may change its face and lead to cleansing campaigns, pogroms and oppressive regimes. The witch hunts in Europe, as well as their later counterparts in the Soviet Union, degenerated into blaming others for prevention purposes, so that people would not become suspicious of themselves. Alexander Solzhenitsyn described a meeting of the Communist Party where Joseph Stalin received applause from the audience who stood for 11 minutes and clapped their hands, until one of the factory managers sat down to everyone's relief. The man was arrested that night and sent to the Gulag for ten years. A study conducted by Michael Macy and his colleagues in 2009 confirmed the effect: "People enforce unpopular norms to show that they obey them out of genuine inner conviction and not due to social pressure."
Blind hatred is the ripe fruit of kibbutz ignorance, as evidenced by Hubert J. O'Gorman's 1975 study. The study showed that "in 1968, most white American adults tended to wildly exaggerate the degree of support they attributed to other whites in racial segregation," especially among those who lived in racial segregation themselves, which increased the spiral of silence.
Fortunately there is a way to break this cycle of ignorance: knowledge and communication. Tyler's guilty plea led others to confess to drug use as well. This is how the code of silence was broken and openness was created to clean the sport of drugs. In Schroeder and Prentice's research on college drinking sprees, it was found that exposing new students to a peer-led discussion, which also included an explanation of the collective ignorance phenomenon and its effects, ultimately significantly reduced these students' alcohol consumption. What's more, Macy and his colleagues found in a computer simulation of a human society where there is adequate opportunity for talk and communication that when skeptics are scattered among the true believers, social connectedness acts as a preventive measure against the takeover of unacceptable norms.
This is the reason why despotic and theocratic regimes limit freedom of speech, the press, trade and movement and that the way to break the grip of such oppressive regimes and ideologies is to spread liberal democracy and open borders. This is the reason that even here in the USA, "the land of the free", we must openly embrace the right of atheists and the gay community to equality before the law and that "coming out of the closet" helps break the spiral of silence. Knowledge and communication, especially if they are created thanks to science and technology, offer us the last good hope in the world.
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About the author
Michael Shermer is the publisher of Skeptic magazine (www.skeptic.com). His latest book, The Believing Mind, is out now in paperback. Follow him on Twitter: @michaelshermer
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The thing is, we are stepping on the spot
People are willing to accept anything
I ask myself, why?
Why are people willing to accept minimum wage, if they are senior engineers
And why are parents willing to accept a teacher who is afraid of her nails, so she won't conduct a science experiment
And why are there no good schools in Jerusalem, neither elementary schools nor high schools, not according to world standards
And not by any standards
And why, when you buy a house and you are told that there will be a natural open space in front of your house - it turns out that an Egged station is being built there
And why do people even agree to play trance music until four in the morning, for almost every day, in the summer months
Is this how a chosen people behaves?
I ask myself, how is it that other nations have more politeness and people are not ready to accept anything even the smallest that bothers them a little.
A well-known method is to say a few true things and then insert all kinds of private worldviews at the end and mislead the innocent reader into thinking that they arose from the true claims.
1. It is not possible to spread liberalism, because the mechanisms of governance and shaping the opinion of the masses are in the hands of the government.
2. Liberal democracy is not a solution because the public is ignorant, and an average of a million ignorant people still remains ignorant (the wisdom of the masses is in total an average of stupidity, and there is really no wisdom in it, even all the masses together will not be able to solve one simple differential equation). The masses appreciate characters like those in the sewers of Big Brother.
3. "Right to equality before the law" is an expression that shows that the writer is just confusing the mind. The law itself defines what a person's status is in front of him. If someone stole then we will go to the law of thieves and there we will find the status of a thief in the law and thus he is discriminated against the rest of the people.
And once again the matter with the gays and lesbians comes back as if it is some kind of interesting topic when it is all about money.